From the Spanish film archives and SEFF, a reflection on cinema as an artistic expression and as a social phenomenon

Friday 14 de October 2016

The search for cinema’s signs of identity will be one of the lines of thinking running through the programming of the Seville European Film Festival in 2016.

Thus, cinema within cinema will be the thread linking the Tour/Detour section, created two years ago to provide a place in SEFF programming for screening new copies of restored European film classics, and which the festival has programmed this year with the involvement of programmers from the Filmoteca de Andalucía, the Filmoteca de Valencia- IVAC, the Centro Galego de Artes da Imaxe-CGAI and the Filmoteca Española, public entities linked to the preservation of film heritage.

In the section, the Filmoteca de Andalucía will show its work in film preservation. On the one hand it will present the innovative project Mi Vida, which reconstructs the collective memory of Andalusia through family and amateur films donated by citizens and narrated in the first person. In a double session, the Festival will show eight of these short films, along with the version restored by the Filmoteca of the documentary Julio Romero de Torres directed in 1940 by Julián Torremocha.

SEFF is programming, also in a double session, Film, the legendary short film scripted by Samuel Beckett, and Notfilm by Ross Lipman. In 1965 the author of Waiting for Godot made an incursion into cinema as the writer of a short film in which he established an enigmatic collaboration with Buster Keaton. Working from that material Ross Lipman, a first rate researcher and restorer, made Notfilm, a wide-ranging film essay that examines what was behind that experiment. The screening of both will be presented by Jaime Pena, programmer of the GAI - Centro Galego de Artes da Imaxe.

Bertrand Tavernier, for his part, invites to take an historical and emotional journey through French cinema in Voyage à travers le cinéma français / A Journey Through French Cinema (Las películas de mi vida, por Bertrand Tavernier). Starting from Lyon, the director’s birthplace and also that of cinema itself, Tavernier takes a personal look at French cinema, at the films, directors, composers and dialogue that have left their mark on it. The screening will be presented by José Antonio Hurtado, programmer at IVAC - Filmoteca de Valencia.

Added to this collection of pieces is Ikarie XB 1 by Jindrich Polák, a Czechoslovak film from 1963 considered one of the most timeless and intelligent sci-fi films of all time. Its brilliant aesthetic and the ingenuity of the Czech version shine in the 4K restoration by the National Film Archive (NFA) made from the camera negatives and the original sound preserved there.

In addition, the Austrian film Cinema futures by Michael Palm will set out some of the crucial questions regarding the future of cinema: Can some ones and zeros really replace a strip of celluloid? Filmmakers like Scorsese and Nolan, or theorists like Bordwell, Brenez and Gunning, guide us through this fascinating journey. The film will be presented by Luis E. Parés, programmer at the Filmoteca Española and for the TVE series, Historia de nuestro cine.

A reflection on the future of cinema and on its traditional model of exhibition is also the idea behind El Último Verano, the first fictional work as producer, writer and director by the documentary maker Leire Apellaniz. This film, programmed at Seminci and at Karlovy Vary, is included, out of competition, in the SEFF programming, within the Resistencias section.